


The Sun in Our Eyes

by audreycritter



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Superman - All Media Types, Superman/Batman (Comics)
Genre: Gen, TW: amputation, loss of limb and loss of powers, platonic bromance, pragma, reclaiming physical affection from the hellpit of toxic masculinity, stranded on an alien planet trope, superbros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 22:25:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17754617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: A depowered Superman has to make a choice to save Batman’s life while stranded on an alien planet.Bruce deals with the aftermath.





	The Sun in Our Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> hey what’s a superbros fic without making Clark sad and also taking one of Bruce’s limbs, amirite?
> 
> title from “Landscape at Speed” by Shearwater

The smooth stone wall was cool against his trembling hand. Here, in the curved path upward, he was sheltered from the wind and his skin itched for the relief _above_ promised. Sweat drenched his already ragged baselayers, soaking through the thin padding of folded leaves that wrapped the top of his crude crutch.

The crutch was creaking ominously under his grip but he couldn’t make his fingers relax. The tautness of every muscle was what was keeping him upright at the moment. If he hadn’t been so focused, so steeped in pain, he might have bitterly laughed. A lifetime of hiding in caves and now this one felt like a prison. He wanted the breeze in his stiff hair, the salty prickling of beaded sweat drying on his skin.

He’d been so close, and now he was stuck, leaning on the wall worn paper-smooth by water years and years before.

That was the best explanation he and Clark had come up with for the pocket of natural caves they’d found, so close to the water. Clark hadn’t wanted to set up camp in them at first— he’d been worried that some seasonal tide would pour over the lip of rock and drown them.

Bruce hadn’t talked him into it. They’d set up nearby, risking exposure, and tracked the water. It wasn’t long enough to be completely sure, but it was long enough that after the bite, when Bruce was listless and fevered and useless, Clark had chosen to take the risk. If a storm came, they’d escape with what they could, but they needed shelter from the present dangers more than they needed shelter from an eventual what-if.

He had returned to himself in the cave, the fever receding until he was staring at the ceiling with dull attention permeated by pain. The pain had become a constant, a thing that went in and out but never left— like the tide he could hear from the thin mat Clark made from his own cape. He laid on his back and watched the thin bars of sunlight inch across the cave wall, where they slipped through the overhead grooves, and listened to the distant surf.

At first, merely being awake and all the things it entailed were work enough. Drinking without his hands shaking, eating without vomiting their precious limited food supply, talking to Clark and coherently following a conversation, shifting to distribute the agony between leg and back: these were tasks that absorbed all his energy, like a thirsty sponge.

The longer he was awake, the more he felt Clark was avoiding the subject of how to get home, and the more the cave felt like a cage. He needed to get up, to move, to think, to do more than breathe and hurt.

Now, halfway up the uneven path, he had regrets about his impatience. He should have worked on laps around the cave first, before trying to leave. His back and the remainder of his leg had seized up, every muscle screaming as if washed with acid. His non-existent calf muscles twitched, as his mangled knee sent futile signals.

He was an idiot. The cave was now as far away as the stone roof above it. He was equally between two impossible destinations. He had no idea when Clark would be back and he was stuck. Eventually, his good leg would give out from the strain— weakened by fever, malnourishment, infection, atrophy from disuse— and then he’d collapse. If he was lucky, he could angle it so that he didn’t fall directly on the stump of his ruined leg. His back would have to absorb the blow, or his ribs. The titanium was a special kind of unforgiving, and would punish the surrounding bone and tissue for the strain.

In short, he was fucked.

There was a tiny part of him, shriveled and ugly and selfish, that wanted to cry. All he’d wanted was the caress of wild wind carding through his hair and beard, soothing his bruised skin. It had not seemed like too much to ask, when staring at the vertical slats of sunlight.

Bruce exhaled long and slow through his teeth, and his breath hitched at the end. He was dangerously close to hyperventilating. His lungs demanded more and more attention while he rattled there, like cleaned bones in a glass jar. If he shook any harder, a bone would chip the glass and he’d fracture and fracture until he shattered.

“I’ve got you,” Clark’s voice said in his ear, while an arm slid around him. “I’ve got you. Can you hear me?”

Bruce’s hand dropped from the wall and scrambled to Clark’s shoulder while he sagged that way. There was a second where Clark staggered, and then caught them both, where Bruce’s heart skipped a beat.

“Hear you?” Bruce echoed. He couldn’t get out a longer or more coherent question.

“I said your name about four or five times,” Clark said. “What the hell are you doing up?”

Bruce blinked, the world suddenly blindingly bright now that his eyes weren’t closed. He swallowed, a dry gulp while his mind roared.

“I…” he said. “Air. Sick of…trapped.”

It wouldn’t have been denseness on Clark’s part for not being able to parse any meaning out of those fragments— some of them, to Bruce’s own hearing, were barely even words.

“Got it,” Clark said anyway. “Up we go. Can you take a step?”

The crutch clattered to the floor when Bruce dropped it to sling an arm around Clark’s shoulders, and the single step took more effort than some entire workouts.

Their progress upward was infinitesimally slow, with Clark coaching gently right by Bruce’s ear the entire time: _another step, there you go, you’re doing fine, one more and catch your breath_. He wanted to snarl at him to shut up but he lacked the will and the energy. The little shriveled part of himself basked greedily in it, hungry for the steady reassurance of Clark’s voice even while he resented himself for needing it. And he did need it.

He threw up once, near the top. It was nothing but bile, and he heaved ragged gulps of air after because his stomach had jerked him into a reflexive hunch that poured magma along his spine. Clark held him up while a helpless whine was wrenched from deep in Bruce’s throat.

“I’m so sorry,” Clark said, his tone thick with exhaustion and genuine sorrow. “We’re almost there, Bruce. You can take a break right here for a minute.”

Bruce shook his head at him because he couldn’t manage the phrase _shut the fuck up_. He was crying, now, the thin tears snaking down into his beard. At least he didn’t have to watch them hit the rock, that way. He didn’t want Clark’s pity but he did need a break. A break he’d let himself take when he was _done_.

The last few steps were managed quickly, a final sprint, and when they were on the level roof, Bruce collapsed. Clark caught him, so the fall wasn’t as hard as it could have been otherwise, and maneuvered around so Bruce’s head was pillowed in his lap.

For several minutes, neither of them spoke— Bruce’s body rebelled, his brain overwhelmed with shrieking signals from countless tortured nerve endings, and for all his training he couldn’t keep himself from weeping. His world shrunk to the prison not of the cave below but of his own body.

It didn’t take long for him to spend himself. He calmed, the pain receding to a lower tide, to the awareness of the wind running across his face and arms and legs. Clark’s hand was in his hair, combing through it over and over. Bruce had the impression Clark had been murmuring the entire time, and had only just now stopped, and that’s why the wind seemed so suddenly loud.

“You should have told me,” Clark said, after they’d watched the alien sky with its pinkish red sun for a while. “I could have rebuilt the stretcher. I could have carried you.”

“Hn.” Bruce was too tired to argue. Half the argument would have been with himself, anyway.

“I found other caves,” Clark said. “And a well. I think this was a village, once. I think I can catch fish tomorrow.”

They needed to focus on getting home. There had to be some kind of signal they could construct, a beacon of some kind. There was a hundred details to consider, to work through, and Bruce found he could hold none of them. His mind was like a sieve, and nothing relevant or useful would remain in his grasp. After a dozen attempts to follow any train of thought long enough to put it into words, he gave up.

Clark’s hand stilled in Bruce’s hair only to run through his own, his head tipped back toward the sun. Bruce craned his neck enough to track the motion. There were clearly defined bruises on Clark’s wrist and Bruce reached up to snatch his arm still.

“What is this,” he demanded, hoarsely, pulling Clark’s arm close enough to study it. He searched for the telltale pattern, the ridges of his own fingers. He had forgotten, struggling up the path, that Clark was fragile in so many ways right now. It wasn’t just strength and flight and super-visions that had left him— his invulnerability had vanished, too.

“Calm down,” Clark said, with a flush of embarrassment. “I’m just clumsy. I slipped jumping down some boulders.”

Bruce’s eyes narrowed but he couldn’t see the ghost of his own grip there, even after hard staring. He let Clark’s arm go, and Clark went back to stroking Bruce’s hair.

“I went to the seaside with my parents once,” Bruce said, his thoughts spilling out without clear intent. “I think we went often, but it was the one time I remember clearly. We had to drive an hour up the coast in northern Bristol. My father had an eight track deck in the car and we listened to the Beatles the whole drive up. My mother was still humming songs when we hunted for shells.

“I found a tidepool full of little jellyfish. I stung my hand trying to save them. I thought they’d die if I didn’t put them back in the ocean. My hand was bright red and hurt horribly, but I tried to hide it. They found out when we sat down to eat a picnic and I wouldn’t take my hand out of my pocket. I didn’t cry until my father cleaned it and bandaged it. I thought he was going to make us go home early, but he didn’t.”

Clark, for once, said nothing.

“I should have listened to you about the solar flares,” Bruce said, the words tripping stiffly over his teeth. “It’s my fault we’re in this situation. But I promise you, you will see Lois and your boys again.”

The hand in his hair stilled. There was a soft and wounded noise.

“You can’t promise that,” Clark said, his voice just shy of breaking. The undercurrent of hard anger dissolved into a helpless, strangled note.

“I am promising it,” Bruce said firmly. “I intend to keep it. Which is why you need to understand this will happen over and over. Physical therapy will not look pretty or easy, and because Alfred isn’t here, I have to push myself. And I can’t do it alone, no matter what I say— I need _your_ word that you won’t keep trying to talk me out of it because it looks ugly. We can’t afford that right now. We also can’t afford you trying to hide injuries like that sprained wrist.”

There was a thin sigh.

“Alright,” Clark said quietly. “I’m supposed to watch you ignore your limits while I give you daily reports about every little scratch. That seems fair.”

“Clark,” Bruce said sharply. He struggled to sit up, and managed halfway before Clark shoved him back down, his hand gentle but firm on Bruce’s shoulder. Bruce gasped at the sky. “That…that’s not what I meant. And you know it.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I _have_ to function again. And we can’t afford you going down while I’m working on that, because you decided to hide things out of some stupid sense of pride, or worse, to protect me.”

“I said I know,” Clark said tightly. “I get it, okay?”

“No,” Bruce said. “You don’t. And I don’t want you to have to. If the worst you have to deal with is watching me puke and and sweat and cry, with a sprained wrist, we’ll be lucky. If you go down, we both do. We do not make it home in any scenario where _you_ get seriously hurt while I’m…like this. I can’t even make it ten steps alone, Clark.”

“I’m sorry,” Clark said. “I didn’t see the snake, and I should have been faster, it was right there and I could have…”

His voice did break, so badly he stopped speaking.

“Kal,” Bruce said softly, a thing he’d never thought to ask yet drenching him in cold horror. “When you decided, when you made the call. What did you use?”

Somehow, in his muddled state, he’d never quite put it together before— his leg was _gone_ , and so was Clark’s heat vision.

“A batarang,” Clark said, one hand over his eyes. “God help me. I’m sorry, Bruce, I—”

“It took a while, then,” Bruce said, comprehension dawning. The fact that in all his days of drifting and waking, he’d never once woken to find Clark asleep. That as soon as he was awake enough, Clark kept his back to him or went out to survey the surrounding land or forage for supplies.

“You have every right to be angry with me. You do. But please, _please_ , can we do this later. You can chew me out all you want, never speak to me again. Watching you suffer will be punishment enough, I swear, but I can’t—”

“Kal,” Bruce said again, more firmly. He pushed himself up, successfully this time, to sit. He braced his hands on the rock and swiveled his aching hips to sit beside Clark. “Kal, when did you sleep last.”

“I can’t, the…the…don’t look at me like that, Bruce. How can you possibly forgive me, after I didn’t stop? You were _screaming_ , Bruce, and it took so damn long, I was too slow. It’s my fault. You’ve told me over and over to train without powers, and I only ever give it a little bit of time. It’s always _fighting_.”

“I don’t remember it at all,” Bruce said.

“What.” Clark looked at him, the crescents beneath his eyes gray and red.

“I don’t remember any of it,” Bruce said. “You did the right thing, Clark. And you did it well. I’ve looked at it. It’s a clean cut.”

“How can you sound like that?” Clark asked. “So…so detached? I fucking sawed your leg off, Bruce.”

Bruce put an arm around Clark’s shoulders and tugged him over. Clark resisted for a half second and then sagged, his face in both hands now.

“You made a hard call and it was the right one. You know how that works. You’ve done it before. You’re just not used to being this physically exhausted after.”

“Gosh darn it,” Clark choked, leaning his head on Bruce’s arm.

“You just said fuck ten seconds ago. You’re giving me whiplash,” Bruce said, resting his chin on Clark’s hair. There was a ragged chuckle from Clark.

“I’m sorry,” Clark said again.

“If you apologize again, I’ll cut the other leg off myself.”

“Don’t even joke,” Clark complained miserably.

“We’re going to take the baselayer leg I don’t need, and wash it in the salt water. Then I’m going to rip it into strips and wrap your wrist. We don’t have ice, so holding it in the water will have to be enough. And then you need sleep. Tomorrow, we work on a plan.”

“You mean tonight you work on a plan while I sleep,” Clark said.

“Tonight, I plan to work on a plan,” Bruce corrected. “Don’t rush the process, Clark.”

“Mm,” Clark said, sleepily.

Bruce jostled him.

“Come on. Up. Wrist first and then sleep. It’s going to take me half an hour just to get back down there, so I’ll go as far as I can while you’re cleaning the cloth.”

“Mmm, okay, okay,” Clark grumbled, peeling himself away and standing. He left, and returned a moment later with the crutch and a batarang.

“Let me,” Bruce said. He made deft work of cutting the loosely knotted fabric and retying it, though once his hand brushed against the stump of his leg and he hissed so loudly that Clark grabbed his free hand and held it until Bruce could open his eyes again.

Clark hauled him, with some effort, to his feet. Bruce picked his way slowly down the path while Clark went toward the shore, and stopped to wait for him just short of halfway.

“Can you do another without me?” was the first thing Clark said, in a strangely tentative voice, when he came back.

Bruce wanted to snarl no, but instead he took another halting step. Clark was at his side as soon as he did, murmuring _good work, I’m sorry, it’ll take me time to know how to push you._

When Bruce fairly dropped himself onto the thin mat, he was trembling again and covered in sweat and fatigue.

“Clark, come here,” he mumbled. He didn’t even sit up while wrapping Clark’s wrist, held above his face for easy reach. When he finished, he snagged Clark’s arm by pawing tiredly at it. The order was more or less a firm command. Mostly less. “Lie down.”

Clark stretched out beside him and within seconds, was asleep.

Bruce waited.

He watched the ceiling of the cave, in the dim and constant light. How long was a day here? He had no idea. He tried for a moment to do the calculations for planetary size with rotation speed to end up with such a similar gravitational field, but lost the mental field of calculations when Clark groaned and twitched in his sleep beside him.

Bruce yawned and fumbled for Clark’s hand, linking their fingers together.

“Everything’s fine,” he said. “It’s just a dream. Go back to sleep.”

He meant to stay awake after Clark relaxed again— he meant to plan— but Clark rolled over and threw an arm across his stomach, a warm and comforting weight.

“ _You_ go to sleep, Bruce,” Clark grumbled, slurring the words.

“Don’t tell me what to do, Clark.” Bruce frowned, and then turned and pressed his lips against Clark’s forehead in a brief kiss. “I’ll sleep if I want to.”

A minute later, he was out.


End file.
